3

Given a bibliography entry with a year range, Biber produces the following warning:

WARN - year field '1991--2007' in entry 'someRef' is not an integer - this will probably not sort properly.

Is there a proper way to specify a year range?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@TECHREPORT{someRef,
    author = {John D. McCalpin},
    title = {{STREAM: Sustainable Memory Bandwidth in High Performance Computers}},
    institution = {University of Virginia},
    year = {1991--2007},
    address = {Charlottesville, Virginia},
    url = {http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/}
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
    \cite{someRef}
    \printbibliography
\end{document}
moewe
  • 175,683
ted
  • 3,377

1 Answers1

5

The year field should only ever contain a (four-digit) year. For fancy things like date ranges or full dates you should use the date field, which accepts ISO8601 input (see §2.3.8 Date and Time Specifications, esp. Tables 3, 4 and 5 of the biblatex manual).

In your case that means that you need

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@TECHREPORT{someRef,
  author      = {John D. McCalpin},
  title       = {{STREAM}: Sustainable Memory Bandwidth in High Performance Computers},
  institution = {University of Virginia},
  date        = {1991/2007},
  address     = {Charlottesville, Virginia},
  url         = {http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/}
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
  \cite{someRef}
  \printbibliography
\end{document}

John D. McCalpin. STREAM: Sustainable Memory Bandwidth in High Performance Computers. Tech. rep. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia, 1991–2007. url: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/.

moewe
  • 175,683
  • I am not sure how appropriate the biblatex tag is, I was attempting the solution from https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/121511/19326, which led to my awkward comment since I was convinced the year field should work. Assuming that answer is correct it works with biblatex but not with biber. Not sure what the appropriate way is to communicate my concerns regarding an edit. Thanks for the answer though. – ted Sep 04 '18 at 12:21
  • @ted Well, Biber can only be used with biblatex, so in a way biblatex is more relevant than the generic 'biblliographies' tag. If you feel strongly about it, you can always click roll back and undo my edit. I won't fight about that. (But maybe you are slightly confused about the difference between BibTeX and biblatex notice the la in the second one.) – moewe Sep 04 '18 at 12:23